Looking for great websites for data-driven business stories? Jaimi Dowdell, training director for Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), offered up a bounty of sites for business journalists to find local business stories at a Reynolds Center workshop in Atlanta on Oct. 11.

“Any time a private business interacts with the government, those are the places to find information,” Dowdell told the 24 journalists at the “Be a Better Business Watchdog – CAR for Business Journalists” workshop at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Public records can be used to uncover basic information; test government officials, procedures regulations and promises; and uncover stories no one else is doing, Dowdell said.

She also offered this caution: “Anything you find online. You need to vet it. It’s just like interviewing a person.”

Here are some other tips for getting data from a government agency:

Request its data-retention schedule to find out what records it keeps. “It’s like walking into a restaurant and getting a menu,” she said, “but the restaurant offers public records.”

FOIA its FOIAs. File a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request asking for the FOIA requests that others have filed.

Ask for inspector general reports from federal agencies, reports from the U.S. Government Accountability Office and reports from state auditors. In a report’s methodology, it will often list data used in developing the report.

Use advanced search on Google to specify.gov sites and .xls (Excel) format to see what databases might be available on a particular topic, such as the Gulf oil spill.